Domain Spring-Cleaning Nightmares
My tale of woe started the other day when I decided that it was about time I did a little spring cleaning of my domains. After all, if a domain is worthless and doesn't produce any parking revenue then what's the point of keeping it?After extensive analysis I logged into my registrar account and pushed the domains that I didn't want to keep into another account. I wanted to make sure that the domains moved across correctly so I opened up another browser window and checked that they were all there. All was well so far.
This is where I made my almost fatal mistake. I then decided to ensure that the nameservers were all set to Parklogic so I did a global edit and clicked yes to the warning messages.It was at this point that an icy feeling invaded my stomach. Rather than choosing the browser window with the new account and worthless domains I'd just changed the nameservers for all of the domains in my good account.
I quickly picked up the phone and called the support line at my registrar to see if they could please immediately stop the batch process that was about to change all the nameservers for my domains. The person asked me to log a support ticket! I couldn't believe it! I indicated that a support ticket would take hours if not days to resolve and I needed this to be looked at immediately.
I know that it was my own stupidity but you would hope that a good registrar would understand the urgency behind the request. In the end I gave up with the support person and just waited for the batch process to run and have all of my websites parked.
I then had to go through every one of my domains to ensure that the nameservers and any redirect links were set correctly. I then had to wait while the changes propagated around the Internet and my mail and websites came back on.
One of the results of this mishap was for a period of several hours whizzbangsblog resolved to a parked page. I even took a screen capture to remind myself to never ever ignore warning messages again.
For those of you that are wondering which registrar wouldn't help me I'm very sad to say it was Enom . To be fair to them they didn't do anything wrong but they didn't do anything right either. I think that this illustrates the problem with support desks, logging support tickets etc. Sometimes, in those rare instances the issue really does need to be addressed instantly. Let me assure you that if it was then I would have been a lot happier.
Domain Wiki: Enom
Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmour -- Reprinted with permission -- August 23, 2008